Is Your Communication Strategy Effective?

by Lucile Rameckers (SKIM Analytical) and Maureen Arink (SKIM Analytical)

Developing an effective communication strategy is hard. Whether or not your message is effective, depends on whether or not the recipients find the message appealing. A message appeals to an individual if the message triggers positive memories of that individual. But what are these positive memories? And how are they related to your product?

The complex memory of people can be modeled as a structure of elements that are linked to each other. This is also called an associative network or knowledge schema.


Figure 1: Associative network

Activated memory
With an internal or external stimulus an element in the network is activated. In turn, that element activates other elements to which it is connected. Eventually, a whole string of elements is activated, from product/service attributes (blue circles in figure 2) via the consequences these attributes have for the individual (yellow circles) to the values that individual holds in life (pink circle).


Figure 2: Activated string in the associative network

A person's thought, feeling, emotion or need can be regarded as the activation of a string of elements. The string is eventually linked to that person's values, i.e. things that people strive for in their lives. Each person acts in a way to ultimately reach his or her goals, his or her end-values.

The more elements are activated in a person's associative network, the higher the chance that your (communication) message will be appealing to that person, since the chance of cueing 'positive' memories is higher.

The bad news
An individual encounters thousands of stimuli per day. Therefore, a communication message must surpass "its competitive stimuli" in cueing memory in order to be effective. The best way to do that is include as many message elements that may activate elements in the associative network as possible. That way, you get the highest probability of actually activating a person's memory and 'beat' the competitive stimuli.

Being effective: how?
An effective communication message explains the recipient
why he/she should buy the product: it tells what the benefits are of using; and
how this is in line with the recipients' own goals (values).

But how do you know what the benefits of using your product/service are to that person, and how this leads to that person's values?

The good news
Laddering is a very powerful tool to find the underlying reasons for buying a product, and to give you practical input for your communication message. With this tool, the benefits of using a product and how these benefits eventually lead to reaching one's values are uncovered. Including these elements in your message, in the recipients' own words – their own frame of reference, will more easily trigger their memory.

Laddering and You
But how does this apply to your products? Products like beer, cars or mobile phones, are sold not only on technical product characteristics, but also for a large part on marketing related issues. When two products are relatively similar in terms of performance, price and/or moment of use, why does a consumer choose the brand to purchase? How does choosing one brand or the other lead to satisfying needs? Using laddering, you can uncover what drives the consumer to purchase a certain brand and reveals at the same time what is the best way to address this consumer to convince him to buy your product!

SKIM Analytical and laddering
In a survey among our clients we have applied laddering to find out why they choose a certain market research agency and how this leads to reaching their goals. For instance, it was found that people find reliability of agency an important characteristic of a research agency because "then I can depend on them, they don't let us down" and "we have a guarantee that the project is successful". It enables them "to feel secure in their recommendation" to their internal client.

Furthermore, we found critical differences between our Dutch and international clients, in the way they selected agencies for conducting their surveys. This knowledge lead to the decision to use a different communication strategy for the two different types of clients (Dutch clients, doing research in the Netherlands, and international clients, doing multi-country research).